Communications and information technologies systems and processes are attracting significant attention and innovation. The many new developments and venues for communications and information transfers, particularly in regard to electronic communications message systems, are fast becoming overwhelmed due to the rapidly increasing number of exchanges between communicators. Three of the most commonly used electronic communications message systems include electronic mail (“e-mail”), telecommunication voice messages (“voicemail”), and facsimile transmissions (“facsimiles”), and all three have become increasingly complex over time and are undoubtedly going to become even more complex and voluminous in the future. Consequently, e-mail, voicemail, and facsimiles, which were once expected to increase individual productivity, have begun to erode productivity because the effort required to manage the increasing volume of communications has become too challenging and time-consuming.
For example, in regard to e-mail, “spam” messages and other widely transmitted and broadcasted but unimportant and undesired informational communications are becoming more and more problematic because they increase the effort required by a typical e-mail recipient to personally prioritize the numerous messages of varying importance in order to separate the “wheat” of good messages from the “chaff” of undesired or unimportant messages. In conventional systems, prioritizing, sorting, segregating, or otherwise acting upon or in response to (hereinafter referred to simply as “prioritizing”) received e-mail messages requires the recipient to determine priority “on the fly” for each e-mail message, which in turn requires that each and every message be viewed or read to some extent—a highly inefficient process. A similar analysis also applies to voicemail messages and, to a lesser extent, facsimile messages which likewise accumulate and which must be separately prioritized through the user's active involvement.
While selected e-mail systems use “filters” to help alleviate the aforementioned problem, most if not all are very limited, inefficient, and largely ineffective. For example, e-mail filters maintained at the server computer act to prevent certain undesired e-mail messages from ever reaching the intended recipient. These filters are typically comprised of special computer instructions (software) that blindly identifies specific words and/or characteristics of an incoming message and systematically discards those specific messages so that they are never downloaded by nor are even accessible to the end-user recipient. These systems are generally inflexible, cannot be easily customized, and generally are limited to either accepting, deleting, or redirecting an incoming message. As for voicemail, facsimile, and other communications applications, even these simple, ineffective filters do not generally exist.
Given the increasing quantity of electronic communications, these conventional filtering mechanisms, and particularly those residing and maintained apart from the end-user, are problematic and ineffective at best and thus are not widely used. Consequently, most recipients of these electronic messages have little choice but to actively review each and every message personally and prioritize or, for unwanted messages, discard altogether each message individually. Existing filtering systems do not adequately address these problems because they operate largely without regard to the preferences or appropriateness of such filtering in regard to specific recipients. For example, the intended recipient may in fact desire to receive certain messages that are in fact being discarded or otherwise prioritized in an inappropriate manner regarding that particular recipient user, or the intended recipient may receive messages that the recipient does not want to receive but which are not precluded by the filtering system. Existing filtering systems afford message recipient with little or no ability to change or vary priorities and associated discrimination characteristics, much less do so “on the fly” to provide specific, unique, and personalized prioritization.